a fine evening for a lady
by Red Thread Studios
Summary: "She lives in a large pale house with long pale curtains that blow in the wind from the gapingly open window. ::implied slash & suicide; Sakura, Sasuke, Naruto & Itachi:: Written for RTS by misssilivren; pt 1 of series


**a fine evening for a lady**

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><p><em>misssilivren<em>

_for RTS_

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><p><em>i learned how to<em>

_stay quiet, just_

_stay quiet, always stay..._

_cause it's still no better for me_

_i still cannot breathe._

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><p>She lives in a large pale house with long pale curtains that blow in the wind that comes from the gapingly open window. Her house overlooks the city and all the lights below are like stars except she can see lines that connect them until they form constellations and neighborhoods. Her house used to be much smaller and darker and dirtier and had all her clothes strewn about in piles and letters and pillows and <em>things<em> everywhere but then she left. Three years and five months ago.

Her husband lives with her but sometimes he lives in Paris or Rome or New York or Los Angeles or Madrid or Stockholm or Chicago or London. Her husband is tall and darkpale at the same time, and he smiles at her more often than anyone else and runs his fingers through her hair sometimes when she's lying on the bed, unable to understand why there's this empty loneliness burning in the space between her ribs. He met her in college and she loved him hardhardhard from the moment she saw him and he hated her until he didn't and now he loves her _(right? right)_. He has a friend, who's also tall but he's very blonde and he smiles a lot and calls her _sakura-chaaan_ and kisses her cheeks and holds her hand and makes the large pale house so much warmer. He closes all the windows and draws back the curtains so that they can all see the view in the library, she and her husband holding fairy-thin glasses of wine and sherry in their fairy-white hands, and laughs when she protests because she doesn't want to be shut away behind glass. She doesn't say that aloud, because she doesn't want to hurt her husband, but she frowns pointedly at his friend and smiles behind her shimmering glass and watches as he downs thick shots of whiskey and talks too loud and looks at her husband too often. They sit together on opposite ends of the couch and she trails her hand through the fog beading on the window and presses her too-hot cheek against the chilled clear glass and feels the wind rattling against it, furious at being shut out.

She used to be a doctor and she wore loose blue scrubs and a long white coat and aching bloodshot eyes and her hair in a sloppy ponytail, and she strode around under the brightbright lights and explained away deaths and mistakes and felt herself getting more and more tired every day. She would go to her small dark home and climb in the cold tub and turn on the water as hot as it could go and soak until she could feel it wearing away at her bones and boiling away guilt and blood off her fingers _(always gloved but still so cold)_ and she wondered why she ever thought she could make a difference. She can make a difference now. There's a wing in the hospital where she used to work named after her, because she signs away money by the millions and donates it to medical foundations and charities and her husband's eyebrows climb high when he comes back and sees how much of his wealth she's given away. Somehow she always thinks he'll be angrier than she ever is; instead he lies on the bed with her and buries his face between her neck and shoulder and apologizes and says she's such a good person, he doesn't know why he ever thought he could put her through this without consequences. She grabs his cold hands and warms them up between hers _(except hers are chilly and bloodless because her gloves are so _useless _here - no, no no don't think that)_ and tells him not to talk like that and feels frightened to her achingly cold core.

His friend comes over often and stays sometimes for weeks and even when her husband is gone she'll wake up in the night and wander downstairs and find him tapping against the door, shivering and blue-mouthed and grinning at her with such relief when he's let in. She makes hot chocolate and lets him warm his hands on that and doesn't go back to bed even though he insists, but she's not tired. She curls up in her long thin white nightgown and talks to him about her husband in college and what he was like and what she did at the hospital and she tells him things she's never told anyone, little things - things about her parents and the small girl she remembers from her childhood but can't recall anything of besides blonde hair and a loud girlish laugh, about how sometimes she feels like her husband doesn't - she stops there because the thought, so wispy and evanescent and laughable in her head, seems to weigh on her tongue like someone has placed pebbles the size of boulders in her mouth. He takes her hand and sighs _sakura-chaaan..._ and apologizes in that frightening way that her husband will sometimes. She hits him and tells him to stop it and he does, laughing and putting up his arms to defend himself and twisting away until he falls down on the carpet with a thud that echoes unnaturally in the house - there's never any sound, really.

When her husband's friend stays over, he doesn't leave for days and days and she never really wants him to, except for sometimes in the middle of the night when her husband slips out of bed and thinks she doesn't notice _(he's never home so how can he know she doesn't sleep?)_ and walks out of the room, and sometimes she follows him _(once)_. She stays far behind and drifts like a shade and thinks, _I am weightless, like a flower petal, I am a ghost and he can't see me and he won't turn around_, as though thinking it hard enough will make it true _(it is)_. She stops at the corner of the corridor where his friend is staying and stays only long enough to hear a soft sigh from cracked-open door of the room that beckons her, tempts her with the soursweet fruit of knowledge before she turns on a pale bare foot and flees, her hair streaming out behind her and she wraps herself in her bed, in the smell of her husband's aftershave and her own perfume and wets the pillow with tears but she doesn't know if they're of rage or misery and she doesn't care. She turns the pillow over and lays her head down lightly and orders herself to fall asleep and because she's told to, she does.

Her husband has a brother. She has seen him once but she's heard about him more than once, when they were in college together and she spent the night and he told her, perfectly in the dark and nothing but a disembodied cracked aching voice, about his older brother whom he hateloved and hadn't seen for so so so long and she for once got to be the one stroking his hair and placing cool fingers against his hot eyelids and feeling tears wet them and that was the first time he kissed her except not really. He moved his head up and pressed his mouth to her palm and then her wrist and then her neck and she stopped him because she knew that this wasn't what she wanted and she thought that maybe it wasn't what he wanted either.

The next time it happened she didn't stop him.

His brother came to their wedding and her husband went wide-eyed and swayed where he stood and held her arm so tight she thought he might bruise it and put her fingers, lightly, over his hand and he let go immediately only to slip an arm around her waist and hold her protectively. She laughed at him and smiled at his brother and introduced herself and asked his name and didn't show what she was thinking about him, how he seemed cold and when he smiled back at her it was almost cruel but also how he looked at his brother more often and behind his slight slight sneers there were slight slight smiles. Her brother-in-law smiled at her once last time, politely, and actually ruffled her husband's hair and told him he was foolish and then turned around and left without another word and when she asked him what his brother's job was her husband pressed his mouth very tight and said _oh look sakura there's that cousin you were telling me about_ and so she went and greeted her cousin and never found out but she could guess _(she was always too good at that game and she wishes she could turn off the part of her brain that provides the answers)_. She sees him again three years and two months after the wedding, when she answers the door in the middle of the night and it's raining like usual except the man outside isn't her husband's friend, it's her brother-in-law and she lets him in because she doesn't know what to do and she's always been a polite girl when it came down to it and she is _(was)_ a doctor and she can recognize blood when she sees it. He asks her ever so nicely not to wake up her husband and says _he doesn't have to know, right?_ and smiles at her and she knows a man in pain when she sees one and so she smiles back and says _of course not let me help you with that_ and sews his skin together neatly and efficiently and now her nightgown is all bloody and ruined but she has others and she doesn't want to burn it. When her brother-in-law leaves he kisses her forehead and says, _you're good for him sakura-san take care_ and she doesn't know whether to scrub away the spot where his lips touched her or press her fingers there to hold the kiss forever. She washes most of the blood out of the nightgown in an effort to bleach out the memory of him and cuts it up and dumps it into the sea but keeps one piece folded up and tucked into the palm of her glove and she doesn't tell her husband anything because there's a guilty thrill of keeping secrets from him _(god knows he keeps enough from her)_.

After his brother's visit her husband starts leaving more often. She wanders around in the large pale house and closes the long pale curtains and opens the gaping window and the curtains billow and tremble and the wind rips through the library and rustles the pages of books and she can smell the faint hint of salt from the sea and waltzes around the library like a fool, missing her husband like an ache and feeling the piece of cloth stuck in her glove like a smoldering burn against her palm.

He comes once more. It's the daytime, and her husband is gone again, this time for a week, and she's in the library sitting in the windowsill partly because she loves hanging her legs over and feeling her dress billow up from the wind until her knees, partly because it's a rare sunny day and she loves the view, partly because she likes the way it makes her feel like a picture, like a portrait someone would paint and attach a ten thousand dollar price-tag to. He says _you're a vision_ behind her and she turns and he is so innocuous standing in her library and smirk-smiling at her that she just has to laugh. _This was probably this library before,_ she thinks, and that thought makes her smile a bit wider. Her brother-in-law spends one night there, and when he leaves he says _goodbye sakura-san, take care of my brother_ and kisses her mouth one last time and then her _hand_ like a prince and she knows that this is it and she will never, never see him again but there's no bitterness as he disappears into the morning mist drifting in clouds from the sea. Afterwards she can feel the brush of his skin whenever cloth touches her, the press of his lips when she eats cherries, can hear the sound of his voice when her husband comes back home and she sees him in her husband's every move and gesture and wonders, ridiculous and giddy, how she never noticed how alike they were before. He says _you're in a good mood_ and smiles a little, like that puts him in a good mood too. She twirls around the halls of the house and curls up to read old books in the library and they smell like leather and age and something that reminds her of fine wine and dancing. She relishes the twists and turns of language woven in her mind and asks her husband where his friend is and would he like to come over? He is surprised but happy in that understated way he has, and as he searches for the phone she watches him and doesn't tell him that it's on the coffee table behind him and thinks that she can never hate him, never never never.

Her husband's friend comes over and they stay up late in the library - she refuses to go anywhere else - and drink wine and sherry and whiskey in heavy shots and fairy-glasses and she thinks she may have never been so happy before. After that she slips into bed with her husband and kisses him on the cheek and he strokes her hair for no reason and slips out when he thinks she's asleep and she gets up after him and retraces her way to the library and thinks, _I'm alive I'm alive I'm alive I'm alive,_ with the simple knowledge that it's true. The window is wide and gapingly-open and there's the sea below it and the city right next to it and she sits on the sill and feels her dress press against her legs and eats cherries from the bowl beside her and kicks out her feet to the wide, wide open sea. The lights from the city are like stars, and the streets that connect them trace out constellations and neighborhoods and whole galaxies. Three years and five months ago she entered this large pale house, and she feels the juice from the cherry staining the finger of her glove and her mouth and rubs a hand on the worn smooth grains of the wood of the sill, and leaves for the last time.

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><p><em>don't you ever get lonely?<em>

_well i wasn't sure that i would be staying_

_so let's stay quiet, yeah, let's stay quiet_

_then we can live, alive for the evening;_

_and you're no better - _

_it's never gone, no_

_i could be so safe..._

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><p><em>AN:_ More Sakura. I am seriously hooked on her. What is this.

ZOMG WAS THAT NARUSASU AND ITASAKU AND POSSIBLY GANGSTER!ITACHI I SAW? Why, yes. Yes, it was. Bring it. (Btw, I usually hate ItaSaku with a burning passion only matched by my hate for NaruHina and NaruSaku. Go figure.) Song is "A Fine Evening For A Rogue" (SEE WHAT I DID THERE?) by Lydia. It's gorgeous.

Aaaand I didn't wanna bother my beta or really wait a sec in posting this thing cause if I wait then I forget and it never gets posted and no one gets to see it and... yeah. SORRY HISAKO! D: Thus, any mistakes are mine and mine alone. Please do tell me if you spot one. In, y'know. A review.

_Please_ review. (This is my first time writing in this style and I'm starting to get a bit insecure with it)

_Edit:_ ugh and now i realizw how weird it is that naruto and itachi call her "sakura-chan/san" when it supposedly takes place in san francisco and... you know i have no idea what kind of drugs i was on when i wrote this. D: BLAME IT ON THE ACID, PPL, BLAME IT ON THE ACID

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><p><strong><em>PSA:<em>** This fic was written for Red Thread Studios, a pretty new community developed on FF by myself and my friend, Yukihana Hisako. Red Thread Studios is a group which was created to gather authors and stories interested in writing about Team 7, make it easier to beta fics and form collabs, and have like-minded people for authors to interact with. If you're interested, please check out the rules on our page (just click the author link) or PM me if you have any questions. :D


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